“... the introduction of the Listerian method.’ It was the same across Europe: Scottish, Danish and French as well as German hospitals became less dangerous. But carbolic was not safe. It was absorbed through the skin and poisoned patients and surgeons, causing kidney damage (black urine was a tell-tale symptom). And laboratory tests showed that it was much ...”

“... Hitler’s obscure relatives, his half-brother Alois’s Irish wife Bridget and their son William Patrick Hitler, who for a time lived in Liverpool. The book is ‘edited’ and introduced by Michael Unger of the Liverpool Daily Post, who describes the discovery of the heavily ghost-written manuscript in New York Public Library. This is a sub-genre of ...”

“... February. For much of last year the post in Gloucester Crescent was delivered by a delightful French girl, Stephanie Tunc; blonde and pretty, she was chatty, funny and also very efficient. Unique among the French of my acquaintance she didn’t like France one bit and pulled a face if you told her you were going on ...”

“... wasn’t in the intellectual league of Cambridge’s Ernest Rutherford or Manchester’s Patrick Blackett or London’s J.D. Bernal, but he had certain virtues that made him ideal for the position of Churchill’s personal scientist. He was posh, rich, well mannered, well connected and Tory – and that wasn’t typical of the British scientific ...”

“... at the mercy of the Hot Hand, mere surfers on the inexorable waves of chance like everyone else? Patrick Barclay’s portrait of José Mourinho, with its subtitle ‘Anatomy of a Winner’, promises an answer to these questions. But in fact it simply confirms how little thought even the best football writers are willing to give to the workings of chance in ...”

“... well. And in spring 1924 he passed the Scottish Higher Leaving Certificate examination in English, French, mathematics, physics and chemistry, German and dynamics. Instead of staying at school for an extra year, Todd decided to go directly to the University of Glasgow, failing to secure an entrance scholarship because he was unable to answer the questions in ...”

“... solid, mischievous’; Charles Swann, ‘wheezing with his awful respiration’; Patrick Parrinder, ‘silent, smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is brilliant, setting the scene for what is to be a bleak ...”

“... too had a friend called Beamish, Noelle Beamish, an Irish lesbian lady who lived in the same French village during the war and left her long, utilitarian drawers out to dry beside her younger companion’s little frilly knickers. On the way back I know that I will miss lunch in the Conrad so I turn, hardly thinking at all, into the new foyer of the ...”

“... such as it was, was inherited and discreet. Mayerne’s family origins were Piedmontese and French, though he was born in the Protestant oasis of Geneva in the aftermath of the anti-Huguenot pogroms of 1572. He was educated at universities in Germany and France, and his first and second wives were both Dutch. His long career as a court doctor was spent ...”

“... apologetics after the German occupation in 1940; the Bauhaus-affiliated die neue linie was, Patrick Rössler writes, ‘a figurehead … and fig leaf’ for the modernist movement under the Third Reich, allowing the Nazis to make a token display of open-mindedness and cultural tolerance. In the US and Britain political commitments were more ...”

“... his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife of Patrick Leigh Fermor, famous at that time for his activities during the war, including the controversial kidnapping of the German commander on Crete. The third was Barbara Hutchinson, whose mother, Mary, a cousin of Lytton Strachey, had been a Bloomsbury hostess ...”

“... Konwicki give a fascinating picture of Poland – no, they are Poland, as Juan Rulfo is Mexico, or Patrick White Australia. Further, they contain some of the funniest, most outrageous, acid and lugubrious writing I have ever read. I don’t think I have ever been spoken to by an author the way I have by Konwicki. The first of these four books is The Polish ...”

“... great actresses and six only. These are Bernhardt, Réjane, Mrs Kendal, Ellen Terry, Duse and Mrs Patrick Campbell.’ The times have changed. If there are any great actresses in 1986, nobody is writing plays for them. Agate met a Frenchwoman in 1917, married and speedily divorced her. He wanted London guardsmen. Arnold Bennett noted in his diary: J.E. Agate ...”

“... are fairly recent. It has long been assumed that the niceties of theory are congenial to French Cartesians, and to Americans, whose literature, in any case, floats free of terrestrial commitment, but that the few English critics who bother with theory are tourists: mid-Atlantic figures like Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner, or Francophiles like Stephen ...”

“... north Norfolk coast. Some edge of the golf course, out of season resort like Sheringham – where Patrick Hamilton dried out, on a regimen of no booze before lunchtime, Hopalong Cassidy novels, and the occasional glimpse from behind net curtains of schoolgirls on horseback. They should have known the real story, because it was there from the start. Staring ...”